Campaign starts for Dylan’s Mountain

A Facebook campaign to rename the mountain where Dylan Redwine’s remains were found has received a mixed response from those who were closest to the teenager.

The campaign proposes to change the name of Middle Mountain to Dylan’s Mountain.

“I think it is a wonderful gesture for Dylan,” Elaine Redwine, Dylan’s mother, wrote in a text message to The Durango Herald. “The entire community was behind the efforts in finding Dylan, and to have the place where he was found named after him would be a great way to celebrate his life and give the community a place to join in this celebration of his life.”

Brad Dobbs, a longtime Durango resident who recently moved to Denver, started the Facebook page “Change Middle Mountain to Dylan’s Mountain, Colorado.” Redwine’s remains were found on the mountain’s steep slopes sometime during a search conducted June 22 through June 26.

Dobbs said he never knew Redwine or his family, but thought the renaming idea “is the best way that we can remember him.” Dobbs created the page the day Redwine’s remains were positively identified, and it received 800 likes within 22 hours, he said. The page now has been liked by more than 1,200 people.

Some of those who commented on the page disagreed with the idea, saying it seemed to connect the mountain and Redwine’s memory to the sad cause of his death.

Denise Hess, a longtime family friend who worked tirelessly on efforts to find the missing teenager, was another who didn’t warm to the idea of renaming the place where Redwine’s remains were found.

“Dylan was murdered and put up there, and I don’t feel like when we go up there that is something we want to be reminded of,” she said. “I don’t want to go up there and say ‘that’s where he laid for seven months.’”

A better idea, she said, would be to petition the town of Bayfield to change the name of Eagle Park to the Dylan Redwine Memorial Park.

At this point the effort to rename anything in Redwine’s memory isn’t even on her radar, Hess said.

“The closest people to Dylan are still reeling from the news,” she said. “We’re mourning, we’re not thinking about changing the name of anything right now. We’re thinking about the loss of Dylan and trying to move forward and find justice for him.”

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names oversees the naming or renaming of geographic features. The process to rename a feature is a long one, requiring extensive geographic information, community support and biographical information of the person to be commemorated.

A person must be deceased at least five years before the board will consider a proposal to rename a location after that individual. The person also must have a direct or long-term association with the geographic feature. A person’s death on or at a feature does not normally meet that criterion, according to the board’s website.